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The best thing that ever happened to me
I won't kid you. There are two Lance Armstrongs, pre-cancer, and post.
Everybody's favorite question is -"How did cancer change you?"
The real question is how didn't it change me? I left my house on October 2,
1996 as one person and came home another. I was a world-class athlete with
a mansion on a riverbank, keys to a Porsche, and a self-made fortune in the
bank. I was one of the top riders in the world and my career was moving
along a perfect arc of success. I returned a different person, literally. In a
way, the old me did die, and I was given a second life. Even my body is
different because during the chemotherapy I lost all the muscle I had ever built up, and when I
recovered, it didn't came back in the same way.
The truth is that cancer was the best thing that ever happened to me. I don't know why
I got the illness, but it did wonders for me, and I wouldn't want to walk away from it. Why
would I want to change, even for a day, the most important and shaping event in my life?
People die. That truth is so disheartening that at times I can't bear to articulate it. Why
should we go on, you might ask? Why don't we all just stop and lie down where we are ? But
there is another truth, too. People live. It's an equal and opposing truth, too. People live, and
in the most remarkable ways.
When I was sick, I saw more beauty and triumph and truth in a single day than I ever
did in a bike race - but they were human moments, not miraculous ones. I met a guy
in a fraying sweatsuit who turned out to be a brilliant surgeon. I became friends with a
harassed and overscheduled nurse named LaTrice, who gave me such care that it could only
be the result of the deepest sympathetic affinity. I saw children with no eyelashes or
eyebrows, their hair burned away by chemo, who fought with the hearts of Indurains.
I still don't completely understand it.
Pain is temporary. It may last a minute, or an hour, or a day, or a year, but eventually
it will subside and something else will take its place. If I quit, however, it lasts forever. That
surrender, even the smallest act of giving up, stays with me. So when I feel like quitting, I ask
myself which would I rather live with? Facing up to that question, and finding a way to go on,
is the real reward, better than any trophy, as I would learn all over again in the 2000 season.
By now you've figured out I'm into pain. Why? Because it's self-revelatory, that's why.
There is a point in every race when a rider encounters his real opponent - and understands
that it's himself. In my most painful moments on the bike, I am at my most curious, and I
wonder each and every time how I will respond. Will 1 discover my innermost weakness,
or will 1 seek out my innermost strength? It's an open-ended question whether or not I will
be able to finish the race. You might say pain is my chosen way of exploring the human
heart.
I don't always win. Sometimes just finishing is the best I can do. But with each race I
feel that I further define my capacity for living. That's why I ride, and why I try to ride
hard, even when I don't have to. I don't want to live forever, I'll die when I'm done living,
but until then I intend to ride my bike - and I'll probably keel over on it.
Every year that I get back on the bike and try to win another Tour de France is another
year that I've survived the illness. Maybe that's why winning a second Tour de France was
so important to me -because to me, cycling is the same as living. I intended to win another
Tour, and the reason I intended to was because nobody thought I could. They figured out
that my comeback of 1999 was miracle enough. But I no longer viewed my cycling career
as a comeback, I view it as a confirmation of what I've done as a cancer survivor.
Lance Armstrong, It's Not About the Bike - My Journey Back to Life, 2000